... or you could just go to new once a day, upvote the last 10 posts, and cash in your rewards.
Yes, possible. On the other hand people could decide to upvote quality content if anyway it brings no additional curation reward to be fast or to upvote popular content only ...
I don't say that would be the case ... just thinking ...
Some for sure.
With the amount of maximizers we have here though, I am afraid we would see a large number of votes going out automated at 100% VP to the next best post, as this would be the strategy to earn most and would take the least effort at the same time.
Manual curation would always be less efficient compared to that, as you can't time your VP perfectly without automation. At least there is a slight chance to beat automation right now.